I’ve recently distro hopped to Bazzite, and saw that it comes preloaded with Waydroid. I’m curious what you fine folk find useful to run that doesn’t already have a Linux native version.
The only one I can currently think I’d use would be Symfonium.
I use it for the Kindle app on my surface pro3 to read magazines.
Kindle unlimited gives free access to magazines, but only on kindle android app NOT on kindle web or Linux.
How well does waydroid run on PostmarketOS?
Do you have a TV in the same room as your PC? Or maybe have you connected it to your Living Room?
I’ve setup a Android TV image, installed Jellyfin and SmartTube.
Paired with a cheap bluetooth remote, it makes a pretty sweet media consumption setup for the couch.Now obviously, you don’t need Waydroid for this at all, you could use native applications but
- The native Jellyfin app for Linux is just a wrapper around the web UI, so you need a mouse to use it, making it annoying to interact with from the couch
- You can use Kodi with Jellyfin plugins, but the default Kodi skin sucks so you’ll find yourself taking a loooot of time configuring a third-party skin before you’re happy with the UI
- You can get browser extensions that trick YouTube into loading their TV interface, but the stock YouTube TV UI sucks compared to SmartTube
So yeah in the end I’ve found this setup to be my favorite “10-foot UI” for media consumption yet.
You turn your desktop into an Android TV box except it’s the fastest you ever used and it has 0 bloat.
Only thing it won’t do is full quality streaming from Netflix or other streaming services because DRM, but I don’t really care about that.This is cool as fuck! I wish I had gotten into Linux sooner, I might have been able to use this setup lol
That is a really good use case.
I installed Khan kids for my child to use without needed a tablet.
Oh that’s really cool! I’ll have to keep that one in mind
I haven’t tried it, but I know people use it to run Minecraft Bedrock Edition. Although I’m reading reports that that broke recently, so I’m not sure if it’s working at the moment.
Minecraft BE is very frustrating - there is a native Linux build for Android, that works great when you can get it to run on a proper computer. But Microsoft’s authentication system makes it very difficult to do that. Minecraft Java Edition works without problems, and is probably the better Minecraft; but the two editions don’t interoperate without server mods, a lot of people run BE, and the kids want to be able to play online with their friends.
Nothing really. We have all necessary productivity tools in Linux and the Android phone is on my desk anyway. I mean don’t get me wrong, Waydroid is nice. And I tinkered around some. But there isn’t anything I’d use it for. Maybe if my bank had some weird companion apps or I needed some other proprietary app or messenger.
